Let me begin by saying thank you to each of you for joining us on this very, very important journey.

I’m grateful that you’ve offered your time and your expertise to support the accreditation project that we’ve undertaken together. A couple of things I want to remind you of, or help you remember, and the first one is I want you always to remember that this is something we’re doing for ourselves. Nobody’s doing this to us. We’re doing this for ourselves so that we can be better; we can better serve our students, we can be a stronger community, we can better support staff, faculty and ultimately deliver on our mission to support and drive national development. 

Now it’s going to be hard. But it’s not like going to the dentist, it’s like getting a car tune up. It’s like trying to check on what we do and how we do it and making sure that what we do meets the standards that we’re being asked to reach. SACS offers us an incredible opportunity to measure who we are, what we do and how we do it against international standards of excellence for universities and each of you in every sector across the entire community will be looking at who we are, what we do and how we do it. And sometimes we’re going to find out that we meet the standards and we can prove it and that would be great and pretty easy work; a long time to collect the documents, assemble them, but not difficult. Sometimes who we are, what we do and how we do it will be a little bit more difficult to show. We know that we do it well, but we don’t have the documentation, we don’t have the record so you’re going to have to do a little more digging, a little more collecting and maybe some questioning and maybe some documents would need to be prepared that we don’t currently have but you’ll get that done. 

Sometimes, meeting the standard by showing who we are, what we do and how we do it is going to be more difficult – you’re going to run into a roadblock, you’re going to find that who we are, what we do, and how we do it doesn’t quite yet meet the standard. That’s going to be a problem moment and what I expect from everyone engaged in this work is where we have a problem, we solve it; we sit down and speak to each other in a respectful and collegial fashion, and we solve problems together because ultimately, what I’ve said over and over. And believe most profoundly is that universities are communities. We’re a university, we’re a community, we do things together. 

Today, you are our community leaders on the most important project we’re undertaking this year and I thank you for that. And I promise you, my entire support for the entire length of this project. I also promised you a pretty big party when we’re done and we’re proud. Thank you.

Janyne Hodder

Acting President of University of The Bahamas